Monday, July 20, 2009

Safire's column this past weekend touched on a couple of interesting points. He talks about the rise of 'associate' for pretty menial employees — like people mopping up after pet 'accidents' in a pet store in his example. And he lays out the logic of why we have a definite article in phrases like "the architect Frank Lloyd Wright". (It's NYT style to avoid 'false titles', but you can click through and read for yourself.)

But check out this:

THE MODEL MUDDLE

Time was (excuse me — “Back in the day”) the noun model meant “a three-dimensional representation of the design of a large structure; a small form of a planned artistic work.” As the 20th century dawned, it gained a symbolic meaning as mathematicians used model as a representation of a concept or system. Then another sense emerged: “an exemplar, a person to be imitated.” That led to “a pattern to be followed, an approach to be emulated,” as in this use in a front-page headline in The Times this month: “Health Co-op Offers Model for Overhaul.”

In The Washington Post, the political columnist Michael Kinsley reviewed several solutions to “the burgeoning field of fretting about the future of newspapers.” He then posed a question: “But which of these ‘models’ (to use the modish term) is best?” (That was a subtle touch by the writer, parenthetically using modish, meaning “fashionable,” to describe today’s lemminglike fascination with the word model in economics and politics.)

Is model in this sense really modish? Regular readers of this blog know that I'm no word guy, but isn't this a virtually inevitable figurative extension of what OED has as the core meaning? To wit:

I. A representation of structure, and related senses.

In fact, it looks like similar usages go way back. If we stretch a little, we can even put the Bard in here, again from an OED example:

1600SHAKESPEAREMuch Ado about NothingI. iii. 42 Wil it serue for any model to build mischiefe on?

Maybe the bigger question here is why people like Safire obsess over relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things, at least) extensions in meaning. With all the richness of language and language change, this gets a page of the NYT Sunday Magazine?